vulnerability assessment

It seems to us that one of the biggest threats that businesses face today is socially augmented malware attacks. These attacks have an extremely high degree of success because they target and exploit the human element. Specifically, it doesn’t matter how many protective technology layers you have in place if the people that you’ve hired are putting you at risk, and they are. Case in point, the â€œhere you haveâ€ worm that propagates predominantly via e-mail and promises the recipient access to PDF documents or even pornographic material. This specific worm compromised major organizations such as NASA, ABC/Disney, Comcast, Google Coca-Cola, etc. How much money do you think that those companies spend on security technology over a one-year period? How much good did it do at protecting them from the risks introduced by the human element? (Hint: none) Here at Netragard we have a unique perspective on the issue of malware attacks because we offer pseudo-malware testing services. Our pseudo-malware module, when activated, authorizes us to test our clients with highly customized, safe, controlled, and homegrown pseudo-malware variants. To the best of our […]

The Good Guys in the security world are no different from the Bad Guys; most of them are nothing more than glorified Script Kidies. The fact of the matter is that if you took all of the self-proclaimed hackers in the world and you subjected them to a litmus test, very few would pass as acutal hackers.This is true for both sides of the so called Black and White hat coin. In the Black Hat world, you have script-kids who download programs that are written by other people then use those programs to â€œhackâ€ into networks. The White Hatâ€™s do the exact same thing; only they buy the expensive tools instead of downloading them for free. Or maybe theyâ€™re actually paying for the pretty GUI, who knows?What is pitiable is that in just about all cases these script kiddies have no idea what the programs actually do. Sometimes thatâ€™s because they donâ€™t bother to look at the code, but most of the time its because they just canâ€™t understand it. If you think about it that that is scary. Do you really want […]

With all the recent hype about Social Engineering we figured that weâ€™d chime in and tell people whatâ€™s really going on. The fact is that Social Engineering is nothing more than a Confidence Trick being carried out by a Con Artist. The only difference between the term Social Engineering and Confidence Trick is that Social Engineering is predominately used with relation to technology. So what is it really? Social Engineering is the act of exploiting a personâ€™s natural tendency to trust another person or entity. Because the vulnerability exists within people, there is no truly effective method for remediation. That is not to say that you cannot protect your sensitive data, but it is to say that you cannot always prevent your people or even yourself from being successfully conned. The core ingredients required to perform a successful confidence trick are no different today then they were before the advent of the Internet. The con artist must have the victimâ€™s trust, and then trick the victim into performing an action or divulging information. The Internet certainly didnâ€™t create the risk but it does make it easier for the threat […]

The cost of good security is a fraction of the cost of damages that usually result from a single successful compromise. When you choose the inexpensive security vendor, you are getting what you pay for. If you are looking for a check in the box instead of good security services, then maybe you should re-evaluate your thinking because you might be creating a negative Return on Investment.Usually a check in the box means that you comply with some sort of regulation, but that doesn’t mean that you are actually secure. As a matter of fact, almost all networks that contain credit card information and are successfully hacked are PCI compliant (a real example). That goes to show that compliance doesn’t protect you from hackers, it only protects you from auditors and the fines that they can impose. Whats more is that those fines are only a small fraction of the cost of the damages that can be caused by a single successful hack.When a computer system is hacked, the hacker doesn’t stop at one computer. Standard hacker practice is to perform […]